Tom Chivers looks forward to understanding the feeling - and the
science - of fatherhood.

That’s the first time I’ve written those words down. I’ve sent informative text messages to various friends and relatives, saying that we’re expecting a child, and I’ve spoken about it in person with various people, but this is the first time I’ve actually written down, in cold black and white, that I am going to have responsibility for the life of another human being. It’s quite alarming.

I don’t want to become one of those people who write breakfast-table vapidities about how they argued with their wife over whose turn it was to take the brat to school. I’m not going to write things about how wonderful being a father is (I hope), or dripping homilies about how my particular child is better than everyone else’s particular child. But there are, I think, interesting things to be said.

For instance, my wife just had her 20-week scan. Our future child’s face is clearly visible; it has a slightly retroussé nose. Its feet are three centimetres long. For some reason I found that fact arresting.

But as much as I can intellectually grasp the fact that I am having a child – through images on an ultrasound and a gently swelling wife – there is no visceral sense of reality about it yet, as there is for Mrs Chivers. I asked my father, and he said that it wasn’t until he held the squalling me in his arms that he felt it was a reality (it felt “utterly right”, he added, sweetly).

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That feeling of rightness, of bonding between parent and child, is an evolved trait. Parents who cared deeply about their child were more likely to have grandchildren than ones who didn’t. (This will be the case in any species that looks after its children for a long time, and human parents look after their children longer than, I think, any other species.) So our mental reward systems – including but not limited to the famous neurochemicals dopamine and oxytocin – have been wired up to make our own children the most extraordinarily fascinating things in the world.

Other people’s newborn babies, of course, all look like tiny, red, wrinkly Ian Hislops and sound like a road drill.

I can, again, intellectually prepare myself for this, but I have no idea what it will feel like. Parents have told me that they love their child with a yawning intensity that makes them “literally want to eat them”; another said that “after 100 hours of his life so far, I've laughed and wept more than in the previous year”. There’s a cold scientific bit of me that is looking forward to experiencing it, like Humphry Davy experimenting on himself with nitrous oxide. I love my wife, and I love my family, but this is, apparently, something different, something overwhelming.

Charles Darwin, the greatest of the naturalists, was powerfully in love with his children – he was crippled with grief by the death of his beloved eldest daughter, Annie. But he also watched them with the eyes of a scientist, observing their development. What he doesn’t seem to have done is observe the effects they had on his own mind. In about four and a half months, it seems, I am going to change, profoundly and almost instantly. It’s a frightening thought. I can’t wait.